textport.

Inspiration test

College students and professionals alike have been adjusting to work-from-home during the pandemic. While conducting research for a report or paper, students and employees often spend much of their time simply copy-pasting information and collecting sources, rather than actually writing the report. In order to help with productivity, we decided to develop a Chrome extension that could take care of collecting sources and direct quotes to give people more time to do their work.

What it does

textport is a Google Chrome extension that allows users to highlight article information in different colors and export this information, along with the source URL, to a Google Document. It is intuitive and simple to use, and anyone can download it from the Google Chrome Web Store.

How we built it

textport was coded using HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Prior to the hackathon, no one on our team had ever made a Chrome extension before, so we watched online tutorials and read through existing Github repositories for inspiration.

During the hackathon, our team split the work into front-end and back-end work, and we uploaded our contributions to a shared Github repo.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, we were not able to complete the functionality of the extension that collects the current URL and exports everything to a Google Doc within the time allotted for IvyHacks. Our project proved to be a bit more time-consuming than anticipated. However, our team plans to continue working on the extension even after IvyHacks is over.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud of learning how to develop a Chrome extension in a relatively short amount of time, even though none of us had ever had exposure to this before. Additionally, we are proud of the product we have developed, as we hope it will be downloaded and enjoyed by other people!

What we learned

We learned a lot about the process of developing a Chrome extension, as well as how to collaborate with teams through Github.

What's next for textport.

In the coming week, we will work on finishing the functionality of textport so that users can export their sourcing and information to a Google Doc.